looking for home.”
“That’s a sweet story,” she says, straining to sound ballsy, trying super-hard not to let her voice go all shaky on her. “Does it end with the puppy biting off your face?”
“Nah. It ends with the puppy taking a big shit on the carpet when he wasn’t supposed to. Sad how they had to put that puppy down. Hit him over the head with a shovel. Buried him in the backyard.”
“I suspect we’re not talking about puppies. I’m taking this English class about poetry, and we’re learning all about metaphors. This is one of them, isn’t it? A metaphor? You’re like a poet.”
“Shut the fuck up and listen.” Smile still in place, but now he’s speaking through those white Chiclet teeth of his. “You kicked over a hornet’s nest.”
“Like that girl from that book I keep seeing.”
“I said shut up. I don’t care who you are. Or what you did. I just want you to know I got your message, and give you a message of my own.”
“White Power?” she asks, sticking out her chin. “Hail Hitler?”
“I’m going to make you hurt,” he says.
He pats her cheek. She flinches—his touch disgusts her, upends a paper plate full of cockroaches inside her stomach. Mitchell Erickson walks away, then, joining up with the flow of kids in the adjoining hallway, merging with the stream, calling to some “bro” of his.
Atlanta goes into the girls’ bathroom and throws up her lunch.
* * *
It’s when she sees Shane at the end of the day that she knows how fucked it’s going to get. His nose is swollen. Not broken, but bleeding. His whole upper lip encrusted with a blood mustache.
Shane’s eyes are puffy, too. He won’t say why but Atlanta knows.
She starts to tell him she’s sorry, Mitchell came up to her, threatened her, she had no idea—
“Mitchell? No,” he says, but the way he says it with his nose all busted it comes out Bitchell? Doh. “Wasn’t him. It was the other two. Jonesy and Virgil.”
Shit shit shit shit shit.
* * *
“Shit shit shit shit shit,” she says. It’s her, Chris, Shane, outside her house. Those two on the porch steps, her pacing in front of them like a nervous tiger. A tiger who’s burned out on no sleep and lots of Adderall and who just got threatened by much bigger tigers.
“It’ll be fine,” Chris says, upbeat, but nobody really believes it.
Shane’s nose looks like the nose of a proboscis monkey. Except scabbier. He says they surprised him around the side of the building. By the bus platform. Hit him across the bridge of the nose with a piece of smooth sanded wood—like a chair-leg or something from shop class. Then they ran off. A teacher found him, actually had the gall to yell at him. Like it was his fault he got bullied.
“That’s how they are,” Chris says when he hears that. “The adults don’t care. It goes back to that rape thing. They think we get bullied it’s because we’re asking for it. Look at the way those nerds were dressed. You’re gay. You’re Mexican—“
“Venezuelan,” Shane corrects.
“You carry comic books. It’s like a bullseye. They don’t ask, how do we stop bullies but instead those assholes say, how can we get these stupid kids to stop painting bullseyes on their foreheads? They rely on it gets better rather than we need to make it better now.”
“I’m sorry,” Atlanta finally blurts out. “Y’all, this is my fault.”
“Your fault?” Chris asks. “Oh, shit, excuse me.” He takes a sip from the beer that Atlanta stole from her mother—Coors Light again, i.e. run-off from dirty rain gutters—and then spits it out in a comical spray. “Your fault? Sorry, wanted to do a spit-take on that one.”
“I poked the bear. You don’t poke the bear. I’m sitting here thinking, what? That I could just swoop in like some kind of god-dang vigilante—“
“Like Batman,” Shane says, holding a bag of frozen peas to his nose.
“—and all the assholes would be cowed? People are monsters for a reason. They don’t stop being monsters just because you piss in their eye. Shit. Shit!”
Next to the porch sits a dead potted plant in a red clay container. She kicks it with her boot. It shatters. Shards and dirt-clods everywhere.
Nobody says anything. Eyes wide, they watch her fume.
“Bad enough we got those Jonesy and Musclehead. But now we’ve got a meaner set of fuckstains coming at us from a whole other side.”
Chris holds up a finger. “Pardon. Can